The hardest part about doing anything creative is sitting down to start the work. The doubt in your mind will do anything to stop you from achieving this deceptively simple step. The good news: if you can overcome that doubt, it only gets easier from there.

Doubt doesn’t want you to start anything.

So many people who decide to create something find themselves crippled by doubt. I didn’t notice it myself at first, but it’s there. It usually disguises itself as rational thought (you don’t have time to start a business), reasoned arguments (you probably wouldn’t make enough money as a playwright) or real-life examples (Billy from school tried to be an actor and he failed). It seem’s that there’s a part of every creative’s brain that wants them to be comfortable and safe, and doesn’t want them to take risks. Chances are, yours is no different.

You gonna start writing that book today? Well, how about you get up early and start! Wait a minute; just check your email first. Maybe check YouTube. Wanna have some breakfast? Hey, a new episode of that show should be up on Netflix now! Oh crap, it’s 4 pm. Well, today is a day off anyway. And I have tomorrow off work too! May as well enjoy the rest of my day. I deserve a break.

Yeah, that’s all doubt. Or resistance, as described in Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art. Or Eckhart Tolle’s pain body. It doesn’t matter what you want to call it, or if you think it’s an internal or external force working against you. The point is, you’ve got one hell of a battle on your hands if you’re ever going to get anything done.

Effortless creation is a myth.

Comfort is the weapon doubt will use to kill us. It’s comfortable to sleep in. To go to work. Even those who would rather do anything other than their day job are comfortable with the routine it offers.

But creatives enjoy what they do, right? And what if you’re not actually interested in making a living off your creativity? If it’s just a hobby, surely it’s something you can do when you feel like it. And if you don’t feel like, why push yourself? If you really wanted to do something you would be doing it all the time.

Absolute crap. Anything you make that involves no effort and no sacrifice will generally be shit. So stop kidding yourself by waiting for inspiration to strike. You got your inspiration two months ago when you decided to write a play. What the hell are you waiting for?

Inspiration is not motivation. Stop confusing the two.

Inspiration is a thing that happens. You get an idea. You realise you want to achieve something. You realise how you want characters in your story to interact. You realise a new product line, or painting technique, or plot point.

What you cannot be is uninspired. Uninspired is a made up term that people say when they mean unmotivated. Inspiration doesn’t make you act; it doesn’t make you do anything. Inspiration is just the thought in your mind. You’re free to act on it, write it down or let it fade away. It’s your motivation that will determine how you act on your inspiration. When people say “I’m so uninspired to write my novel,” what they’re really saying is “I can’t find the motivation to write my novel.”

Make sure you’re motivated towards the right thing.

Okay, so now we’re clear: what we need is motivation, not inspiration.

Well, motivation is doubt’s favourite target. And doubt’s favourite weapon is to present you with the big picture. Nothing will de-motivate you quicker than an unachievable goal.

You wanna write a book? 100,000 words? And you’ve written, what … five words so far? 

Oh, you’re gonna start a YouTube Channel? How many subscribers do you have? Three? All of them related to you? Good luck with that!

Here’s the truth, though: all you have to do is sit down and start the work. Everything else will flow from there. This is the one thing doubt needs to stop you doing. And if you can win this battle, the whole process becomes so much easier.

Yes, there is a lot to do between now and finished novel. Between now and your first million subscriptions. Between now and the finished canvas. But that’s not the goal today. All you need to do is sit down and work, and achieve what you can in the time you have.

Build the habit to sit down to work every day.

We’re in this for the long haul, and this is only the beginning. What you achieve when you sit down to work is, at this point, irrelevant. 50 words, 5,000 words. A bio for your YouTube page. A rough sketch. What’s important is you’ve overcome doubt’s attempt to stop you from doing something. And if you can make that a daily habit, everything else can be built on that foundation.

Dreams, goals and aspirations are all good things to have. I would say they’re critical to the success of any creative endeavour. But when it comes time to work, you need to focus on one thing: sit down and start working. Your one goal is to achieve only what you can achieve today. Everything else will follow.

What do you think? Email me at anthony@anthonywkauthor.com or talk to me on Facebook or Twitter!

A mother hears her young son talking up the hallway. When he comes into the living room, the mother asks who he was talking to. “Just the man up the hall,” the boy says with a smile. She knows it’s just his imagination, but is still unnerved by the situation, and feels compelled to check.

An obnoxious, over the top celebrity superstar falls from fame when a prank he orchestrates causes the suicide of the target while millions watch. Disgraced and shunned, he has to rebuild his life. But maybe something from his past mistake is haunting him, and won’t stop until it has revenge …

And there you have it: my book for NaNoWriMo 2017, Haunted. Those three ideas bounced around in my head; years apart, but all inspired by real events or real people. When I decided I wanted to do a quick, stand-alone story for this years NaNoWriMo challenge, those ideas are what came to mind.

The idea is just the beginning.

Anyone can come up with an idea for a story. Usually something along the lines of “imagine if this was really like this!”

Imagine a horror story, but the typical jock character turns out to be a vampire!

What if there was a show like Game of Thrones, but it was set in space!

How about this for a story: everyone wakes up one morning to discover all the trees are gone!

But as you soon learn if you ever feel inclined to sit down and write a story from your idea, there’s a big difference between an idea and a story.

A story is characters and plot, all working interacting with each other and changing each other. Well, a good story is, anyway.

Your characters should affect the plot, which in turn changes the characters somehow. That’s it. If your characters aren’t making any decisions and changing anything, they’re just passengers to your story, and it’s probably a boring plot. If your characters remain utterly unchanged from beginning to end, they’re probably boring characters.

Plenty of authors can take a few ideas like the three I opened this article with, make up some characters and just sit down and write. After a while, they’ll emerge with a perfect story. Often referred to as “pantsers” because they just fly by the seat of their pants, these authors don’t require planned plot points to make an enjoyable story.

I’m not one of those authors. I’ve tried it before and let me tell you, it’s a mess. A hot mess. Lots of people standing around having boring conversations and not doing anything. I can’t do it, so I follow the path of the “plotter,” someone who plans out their story beforehand.

For NaNoWriMo, I wanted to try Mind Mapping.

The plot point about the social media celebrity falling from grace was something I’d had for a while. I’d even gone so far as to plot out a quarter of a story in a spreadsheet. It never got any further than that, though. This time around I wanted to try out Mind Mapping, mainly because it looks pretty and I find spreadsheet really really boring.

If you’re not sure what I’m talking out, check out what mind mapping is by clicking here.

Usually, I would sit down at a blank screen and just type out my story and character ideas until I was empty, then plonk all the plot points into a spreadsheet and flesh it out from there. Because I wanted to embrace the whole mind mapping experience* I started with a blank mind map and just started throwing words onto it.

I want to give you pictures to demonstrate what I’m talking about, but I didn’t save any “work in progress” versions of my mind-map. So I’m going to pretend that I’m plotting out a whole new novel, the same way I did for Haunted. For fun, I’ll take those three random examples I came up with a little earlier:

• a horror story with vampire jock
• game of thrones in space
• all the trees are gone

So with these in mind, I just start throwing words out.

I’m using MindNode on a Mac. I’ve tried other mind mapping apps. I like this one the best.

So after a few minutes just plonking things down, this is what it looks like. Now if I were planning a whole novel then I’d do this for longer and have more things, but this will do for this example.

Next. I’ll start connecting things to each other, like this

I’ve added Setting and Story Ideas there, and usually, a few other thoughts will come in as I’m moving these around. Next step is to plonk the working title in the middle. Then, all the planning stuff goes on one side (left side for me; there is no significance to this, you could put it wherever) and all the plot goes on the other.

Now things are starting to get fleshed out, and it will all change as time goes on. The beauty of any decent mind mapping software is it’s easy to grab and drag things around, adjusting where things sit and what associations they have. You can even make little arrows pointing all over the place if you want to, like this.

So on one side is all the planning stuff; this will see a lot of adjustments as characters change throughout the planning and writing of the draft. “Story Ideas” is where I’ll dump anything that springs to mind, and then I’ll just drag it out and drop it where it’s needed when I’ve fleshed it out a little.

The other side is the plot. The structure I use is quite specific, but isn’t essential:

1. Acts. I tend to split stories into 3 acts, which I find helpful for pacing and length. Some people ignore the act structure or use a different number. Whatever.
2. Broad story beats. These are the general plot points that are happening in this section of the story: Mike goes to work. Mike discovers the body of the boss in the office. Cops arrive and arrest Mike. The shadowy figure turns up and offers to help Mike get out of this situation … for a price. That sort of thing.
3. The next branch is specific scenes. What is happening; what you would physically see “on screen” if this scene was in a movie.
4. The last branch is what’s happening either in a character’s mind, refers to things behind the scenes, or maybe points out where this links to a past or future scene. This branch is usually used to inform me what’s happening outside of the reader’s knowledge (“this was left by the killer” or “she is actually lying when she says that, but Frank doesn’t realize”).

There’s no real order to any of this. Sometimes it’s an organic flow, where I’ll come up with a beat and then write all the scenes off that. Other times I have a specific scene in my head and need to work out where it goes. With the mind map, it was easy to insert things, move them around, take them out and re-order everything when needed. So much better than using a spreadsheet.

Then, when I’m drafting in Ulysses, the mind map will set there in my split-screen view, like this.

The great thing about that is it’s easy to glance at while I’m typing. So long as I keep each branch to short sentences, I can quickly look over at it if I forget what’s meant to happen next.

So there you go – that’s how I use mind mapping. Here’s the full mind-map for Haunted. It’s just to give you an idea of the structure involved – don’t bother trying to zoom in enough to read the words. I haven’t tidied it up for public consumption yet – I tend to use movie stars as character descriptions or refer to scenes in movies or shows to describe a vibe or a tone I’m going for. These are personal and not intended for anyone but me. When I’ve finished the draft, I’ll tidy up the map and release it for anyone to read.

It wouldn’t zoom out far enough to fit on the screen, but you get the idea. Any decent mind mapping software will let you expand and collapse point (called nodes), so I usually have everything closed except the scene I’m working on at the time.

But why do all this planning?

A final thought on planning – doesn’t it ruin the creativity? Doesn’t it stifle the story? The short answer is “no.” Not for me, anyway.

A lot has been written by far more competent authors than me about planning and plotting novels. All the advice I’ve read always insists you pay attention to your characters and change your plot as necessary.

It’s hard to understand if you’ve never written something before, but characters will change as you write them. For example, in my plot for Haunted, there was a girl – the stepdaughter of the protagonist. When I was beginning to plan out the story, I saw her as a 12-year-old girl, long hair, smart. Enjoys school. Athletic. Gets on well with the protagonist, even though he’s not her birth father.

As I neared the end of planning the plot, I realised I had some things in there – ways I needed her to behave and things I needed her to say – that just wouldn’t sound right coming from a 12-year-old. This became apparent when I started drafting, and straight away I dropped her down to 5 years old. Now all the plot points and planned dialogue made sense, and everything was swell.

Well, the 12-year-old wasn’t having a bar of it. A few scenes into Act 1 and my protagonist is suddenly talking about his older stepdaughter. The 5-year-old was already there in the scene with the protagonist and his girlfriend (the girl’s mother), but they were waiting on the older one to come home from school. He now had two stepdaughters, and that was that.

I could have just hit backspace until she went away, but it seemed right her being there. So I just changed the plot. The basic structure of what happens stays the same, and it doesn’t really change the ending. It only changes what happens, and how the protagonist grows.

Similarly, let’s say your plot says your character needs to go from A to B to C. Then halfway through the draft of act 2, you realise that her leaving B just doesn’t make sense. So you update your plan. Maybe now she sets up shop in B and learns to live there for the rest of her life. No big deal.

So why bother having a plan in the first place? When you know where the story is roughly going, you’re less likely to get stuck. And if you need to change things, you’re changing them for a reason, not because it’s the first thing you could think of. Not to mention a plot can be as intricate or as broad as you like. And I find it invaluable to have a broad, “zoomed out” view of your story when it comes time to review it.

Plot structure evolves the more you get to know your characters, and I find mind mapping to be a great way to organise that structure. Got a better way? Like my way? Let me know on Twitter, Facebook or email!

* I know that proper mind mapping is meant to be done by hand, with only one word per branch. I don’t care.

This month, I’m using NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) 2017 to get back into the writing habit I seem to have lost. And the blogging habit. And social media, too.

There used to be a paragraph here talking about what I’ve been doing and why I haven’t been writing. But who cares? Let’s focus on NaNo for now.

Plenty written, nothing finished.

I would say that I “won” NaNoWriMo in 2015, in that I got the required 50,000 words onto the page within the month. But my story sucked, and I never finished editing it. I only needed the slightest excuse to abandon it. Not being able to work out a great ending was pretty much the only excuse I would need.

The problem, in hindsight, was my piss poor planning. I went in with two-thirds of a plot and figured the rest would work itself out. It didn’t.

I usually know how I want a story to end, then think up the structure of the beginning. Next, I’ll write a plot from that beginning point to the end point, getting stuck somewhere towards the last third. Even though I know all this going in, I always think, “ahh well it’s alright. It will all come good as I write it.” Then I get stuck in!

Well, it’s been years now, and I’m sitting on a lot of unfinished rough drafts. They all got as far as that point they were meant to “come good.” None of them did. The finished rough draft I have is still waiting for me to edit it. And one day I’ll do that. But not this month – this month it’s time for a new story!

Using NaNoWriMo to create better writing habits.

It’s NaNoWriMo 2017! So this year it’s different: I’ve been spending weeks working on the plot of a story, with the plan to have it ready for day one. Which it was. In fact, it took a lot of self-control not to start writing. There was the tricky bit towards the end, trying to connect the end to the rest of the story, but I got there. And while I will be tinkering with it as I draft my way along (well-laid plots don’t typically survive characters riding rough-shod all over them), this is really the first time I’m starting a draft with every significant plot point ready to go. Joy!

So what else is different? I’m using mind mapping software for planning at the moment. I usually plonk scenes into a spreadsheet, but I’m finding the versatility and flow of Mind Mapping to be a lot of fun.

I’m also tracking everything. I have a target sheet where I put in my day’s word count, minutes and Words Per Hour, making sure I stay on track. I know I’ll be unable to write on Friday mornings. I have a three day weekend planned for sometime in November. With my target sheet, I can prepare for these days of non-writing.

Another good use for all these metrics is looking for ways to improve them and track what might cause adverse effects. For example, my Words per Hour rate plummeted during times I was playing music with lyrics. I’d even try listening to k-pop and j-pop because it was upbeat, peppy, and I can’t understand the words. Turns out no – for me to function at top speed I need either silence or instrumental music only.

The other thing is editing. I don’t want to get to the end of the month with a long, rough draft and then have to start rewriting the whole thing. This time I’m going to start re-working the draft in the afternoons, or mornings after I’ve done my drafting. I’ll go into my process in a later article.

And so begins Haunted: A Novel.

So what’s the story going to be about? Well, it’s not science fiction or fantasy. It’s going to be a supernatural ghost story thing; something I’ve had kicking around in my head for a while. It’s a simple, self-contained story. Not like the sprawling fantasy series that will totally get edited any day now.

Right now I don’t want to go too in-depth into the plot. It’s early days, and I gotta ease my characters into it to make sure they can do what I want them to do.

So follow along with me as I pick up my writing where I left off. Next up I’m going to go into my new planning/plotting with mind mapping techniques. After that, I should be able to tell you the plot; maybe even share some first or second draft stuff!

Want to chat? Get in touch via Twitter, Facebook or email me. Want to join an email list? Well, it will be up and running (again) soon.

Why would you need a Zero Draft?

We spend our lives consuming finished products. In doing so we forget about the rough drafts and revisions that our favourite novels went through. Ever spent hours staring at the blank page (or the blinking cursor)? We’re crippled by the notion that what comes out has to be perfect. We rarely hear about how many takes an actor needed to perfect a scene. How many times a dancer fell before nailing an amazing routine. How many photos the photographer took of a scene before deciding on the final one that now hangs in the gallery. When we decide to make the move from consumers to creators, we seem to forget that every performance, artwork, book and game has risen from a pile of revisions, practices and failed attempts. This feeds into doubt. When you compare your first attempt to a finished masterpiece, doubt will step in and point out how far off the mark you are. It will offer it as evidence that you can’t sing. Or dance. Or write. Paint. Act. Whatever.

Doubt wants to kill your creativity.

We forget that the finished product is going to be completely different from that first attempt. This is where doubt will try to stop you; it’s so much easier now than later, when you’ve put hours of work in. Doubt will drain your motivation and make it easy for you to give up. The Zero Draft is a simple concept: sit down and write without editing anything. Constant typing is the goal. No stopping and thinking! This removes the most difficult problem a writer has to overcome: sitting down to write. It’s even rougher than what you were taught a first draft should be. If you can help it, don’t even touch backspace. If you make a mistake, hit space and start the word again. Stay in ‘creation’ mode.

Zero drafting kills your doubt.

No-one else will ever read your zero draft. This pledge is what you throw in the face of doubt every time it tries to stop you writing because of what other people might think. Because you are going to edit what you write, it doesn’t matter what comes out. You’re going to polish it until it shines, and that’s going to take a few passes. And it’s as simple as that. If I’m writing a blog post then I’ll write with the topic or title in mind. It’s not until a few edits down the road that structure and headings get considered. For fiction, I’ll have a plan for the scene that I’m writing. That will be somewhere easily in view, and I’ll glance at that as I write the draft.

You cannot edit a blank page.

You know how someone sitting at a pottery wheel will slam the clay down, spin the wheel and craft that mess into a cup or plate or something? Sitting and staring at a blank page is the same as a potter spinning up the wheel and trying to shape something before slamming the clay down. There’s nothing there! How can they hope to shape it in to something meaningful? Belting out that zero draft is the same as slamming that chunk of clay down. Now you have something in front of you, you can work it into something better.
To better illustrate this point, here is the zero draft for this blog post. Untouched, unedited and unchanged. I know that I’m breaking my own first rule, but I think that it’s the only way to really show what I mean. Compare that what you see here to that. It took 4 drafts to get to this final product you’re reading now. Try it. Find an idea or get a writing prompt from somewhere, turn off that inner critic and blast out a zero draft. Then spin the wheel and mould what you’ve created into something better. Don’t sit there trying to edit a blank page!

Three days planning = fried brain.

It took one day more than I thought to plan out my plot and characters. Day one was tough, because I had to go to work. Then I had four days off in a row – Monday through Thursday.
I spent Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday planning everything out. This was a new experience for me. Normally I plan a story up to a point, but there will always be fuzzy bits – parts that aren’t clear to me exactly what might happen or how they might resolve. In the past, I just figured that the story will work itself out in the draft.

This time, though, I didn’t let myself start writing until I knew what was going to happen in every scene. This lead to quite a lot of sitting around and thinking. On the second day I threw out what plot I had but kept the characters. On the third day I spent hours trying to figure out how to make this one story element work (the solution was to just remove the element to make the story work). I had some solid characters, a good plot and a fried brain. So I took the fourth day off.

Different Work Habits.

Sitting for a long time, staring and thinking. Working for hours without a break. Working long into the night. Once I had set the deadline of three days to plan, it all became about getting it done. Up until that point, I’d normally stop a days writing at 11:30 am, figuring that my creativity was done for the day. Guess I proved myself wrong there – turns out I can be ‘creative’ for more than four hours.

Luckily the same thing happened when it came to drafting. I was able to draft in the afternoons as well as mornings. Late at night, however, is a struggle for me. I just can’t seem to engage the part of my brain that drafts come from past around 7pm.

50,000 words done, but the story isn’t over.

At the 50,000 word mark, the narrative is about three quarters of the way through. However, I’m stopping the drafting now and starting to edit.

The drafting process has slowed down – words aren’t flowing as fast as they used to, and this is my indicator that it’s time to revise the story to make sure I know the characters and plot. I actually would have done this a while ago, but wanted to hit the 50,000.

Hand Writing is Not For Me.

So after the first full day of work on the outline, I gave up on the whole handwriting thing. It’s not for me. I realised pretty soon that not being able to instantly search your notes for what you wrote about a certain person or location wastes too much time. Also, it hurts my fingers after clutching a pen for seven hours straight. So no, it’s back to using the computer for everything, and I’m fine with that.

And finally, returning to an old friend, asking for forgiveness.

Ulysses is pretty. It was okay to work with. But you know what? It turns out there were some things that I missed with Scrivener, or had forgotten about until I reached for them and saw they weren’t there. So as refreshing as it was to try something different, I’m back on Scrivener and loving it just fine.

Don’t forget the Blog.

This article started as a six day update, then a two week update, and now here I am, 22 days in. I never got around to finalising and publishing an article while I was in the middle of drafting. It’s a small thing, but it would have been nice to have a record of my thoughts and processes over the month, instead of this summary based on a few lines and what I vaguely remember thinking at the time.

There’s one final thing that I’m committing to change on the eve of NaNoWriMo: I’m writing my novel in Ulysses. Scrivener, the program that I’ve been writing with since I knew it existed, is being shelved for this project. And if Ulysses works out well for the novel, it might end up taking Scrivener’s place permanently. If none of those words above mean anything to you, the rest of this article isn’t going to get any better. You might want to skip it.

First of all let me say, I love Scrivener.

I really do. It’s amazing. I would say that anyone who writes anything longer than a blog post should definitely check it out (though it can be great for blogging, too). In fact, they have a special NaNoWriMo trial for people that want to use it in November – it’s free to use up until November 7th. If you write, I strongly recommend you to check it out. There is no way I could have produced the work that I did without it. I shudder to think what it must be like for people who are still stuck writing in something like Google Docs or Pages. Even more for people still stuck on Microsoft Word. These programs have their place, but writing long form fiction is not it.

With that said, I’m leaving Scrivener for a month. It’s not Scrivener, it’s me. It’s all me. The things that are pulling me away are going to seem petty and superficial. But that’s okay. Maybe I need some time away to appreciate what I have.

Scrivener is huge. I think of it as the Photoshop of writing apps. I know people that use Photoshop on a daily basis that tend to say “there’s so many features, but I only use what I need to use and ignore the rest.” That’s like me using Scrivener.

I find I’m spending huge chunks of my writing time exploring tips and tricks on using Scrivener, and then more time actually making changes within the program. I can colour-code my index cards? I can choose the opacity of the status stamp? I can set individual scene targets (that strangely do not influence or interact with the overall manuscript target)? Well I better get that all set up before I do any more writing!

It’s always frustrated me that a lot of Scrivener’s features don’t reveal themselves intuitively. It’s definitely something that you have to invest time in learning how to use fully. There’s a For Dummies book on it. There are people that have built businesses teaching people how to use it. And that’s great. But you know what? I just want to get my words out on the page and be able to look at my scene structures. I want to be able to jump from scene to scene. And I want to like what I’m looking at, because I’m going to be spending a long time looking at it.

Anyone who does use Scrivener is probably expecting another reason. Let me tell you know that I’m one of the few Scrivener users who doesn’t give a crap about the iOS app. I did, for a long time. Then I bought a MacBook Pro, and I haven’t touched my iPad since. So this isn’t going to be another I’ve waited too long for the iOS app posts. I don’t want it or need it.

Plain Text and Design.

There’s a big buzz about writing in plain text, and that always seemed odd to me. Why do people get so excited over the idea of plain text, when you can just use something else to make your writing look better?

I learned that with plain text you just focus on getting the words down. There’s no choices to make about font or layout. Also, your words aren’t locked into any proprietary format – anything can read plain text.

The problem with a simple plain text editor like notepad is that once your text gets to a certain length, it becomes unwieldy. Trying to jump from chapter to chapter or scene to scene in a simple text editor is a complete nightmare.

The way something looks also matters. I’ve jumped on the minimalism bandwagon. In fact, it’s been affecting a lot of what I do. I’ve been trying to declutter my life, simplify my writing process, and only focus on what matters. Yes, like so many others I’ve been inspired by the Minimalists and Zen Habits blogs. Check them out. They might change your life.

How you feel does matter.

Scrivener is an incredibly functional piece of software that makes it super easy to plan out and do your writing. I love the new look it has with El Capitan. But I find myself wanting something different. And I don’t know if it’s just me getting bored, or if I need to spend some time apart so I can appreciate everything it can do.

Ulysses makes all the claims of being a minimal editor that gets out of the way and lets you focus on the writing. It claims to be simple to use and yet functional. And there’s plenty of people using it to write novels. Also, they too are offering a free NaNo trial that works up until the 7th December. So I thought, why not?

The Perfect Training Ground.

November is going to be a high stress time for me. I’ve committed to getting at least 50,000 readable (non first-draft) words out for everyone to read. I don’t want distractions and I want to love the screen I’ll be staring at for hours. If Ulysses is as simple and and powerful as it claims, then it should be no trouble at all figuring it out and getting the work done. I’ll know straight away if it works for me or not.

And I know – I could easily just ignore all the options in Scrivener and just use it as is. Like I said, it’s all me. Petty and superficial reasons. But you know what else? I’ve had the Ulysses trial now for a week, and I think I’ve written more blog articles in that week than I have for the whole year and half I’ve had this blog up and running. I’m really enjoying using it. Is it just the novelty of a new program? I don’t know, but I sure will soon!

Besides, Ulysses doesn’t export to the kindle .mobi format, so I’m going to have to return to Scrivener for that, at least.

The belief is something that I just came to accept about my process: I can only write in the mornings. The skill is handwriting: something that I’ve always planned to incorporate into my writing but just haven’t got around to it. Well, in November I’m going to look at changing these two things.

Production Cometh in the Morning.

Writing first thing in the morning is a theme amongst a lot of authors that have spoken about their daily ritual. The process of getting up at 5am, working for four hours and then having the rest of the day to do other things seems pretty common.

I’ll admit that I feel the same. After lunch time my willpower is drained, and usually that’s when I’ll slow down or do something else, like photography. Or play Xbox. Here’s the problem though: I wasn’t born with the drive to write in the morning. Being able to get up early and write for a few hours every day – that’s a habit that I’ve built up over time. I didn’t just switch it on one day; it took months of working a little more every week.

When I first started the habit, sitting down to write for half an hour took a lot of willpower. Now it takes a lot of willpower to take a break (if it’s before 11am). My point is, after lunch, I feel the same about afternoon writing as I used to about morning writing. For some reason I’ve accepted it because it’s something other people do. And for a while now I’ve wanted to change that.

I like the idea of working into the night. Of sustaining myself on coffee at 1 a.m. while I finish a chapter or frantically edit a scene. So in November, I’m going to push the limits of my working day, and build a habit of extending it out to the whole day.

Hand writing.

I have a love/hate relationship with hand writing. I love the idea of having pages of hand written notes to pore over, but my own hand written notes tend to look terrible. I know I cannot write a draft by hand. The faster I write, the worse my hand writing becomes. I have to slow myself down and pay attention to the way I am forming the letters so I can actually read them again later. However, for planning and plotting, this is ideal.

I’ve been wanting to make hand-writing a part of my process for a while, but have struggled to find a way that works for me. The question has always been ‘do I use just one notebook, or have a different notebook for each project?’ I’ve gone the one notebook route so far. I label the top of the page with whether it’s a blog post or a character sketch or a story idea. However, the only way you can sort through this is chronologically. For example, I can’t really see all of my blog post ideas in one place.

The solution presented itself to me when I was sitting on the bus the other day. A high-school kid got on board clutching the obvious answer: a binder! I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. So I’ve got myself a binder for November, with little dividers and everything, and I’ll be making all initial outlines and character sketches in that, away from the computer.

I know. NaNoWriMo is supposed to be about writing a novel, not cramming as much self development into the month as possible. For me, being under a stressful deadline is the perfect time to find out what works and what doesn’t. I won’t have time for anything that doesn’t feel natural or comfortable. A month is a very short time to put a novel together. If having that stress isn’t enough to get me working into the night then I’ll know for sure I’m a morning person. And if I don’t feel I’m getting any benefit from hand-writing notes, then I won’t have time to just do it because I like idea of it.

I have one more big change coming, too – I’ll cover that tomorrow.

The rough draft is not the final draft…

This is the number one, fundamentally groundbreaking concept. Once I understood and applied it, everything changed. Three simple things:
1. No other person can ever read your rough draft, so it doesn’t matter what you write.
2. Don’t stop typing. Write what comes to mind.
3. No editing until the story is finished.

The process has been improved using things like ”writing sprints” and better planning, but the fundamentals have remained the same. As soon as I learned this concept, I belted out drafts like nobody’s business. Problem was, they went nowhere. Great ideas, some of them. But they dribbled off into nothing. Or my characters stopped doing anything.

…but it still needs a little planning.

The next couple of stories had rough plot outlines. However, during drafting they inevitably went off the rails, striking out in a direction that I didn’t plan for in my outline. The problem was, I didn’t go back and update the outline with the new plot. The result: two 150,000 word stories and no way to zoom out and look at the overall plot of either of them. The thought of reverse engineering an outline from these drafts terrified me to the point of inaction.

In my last post I recommended “Rock your Plot” and “Rock your Revisions” by Cathy Yardley. One lesson that really stuck out to me was to know exactly what scenes are going and staying before you start editing a single word. What’s the point in getting the pacing and dialogue perfect if the scene has to get cut because it doesn’t advance the plot?

So I won’t be drafting anything in November until I have the outline and character information down pat. Also, the editing phase shouldn’t take so long because I won’t need to worry about doing all this stuff later.

Communication is Key.

I’ve let communication fall totally by the wayside. I get charged about twenty-five bucks a month to keep the email list running. So yes, over the past … ten months? … I’ve been paying Aweber, my provider, for nothing. Always thinking “yeah I gotta get back on track with that.”

Same with my Facebook Page and Twitter. These cost nothing, but I’ve ignored them. This all leads to a future where I’ve written tons of books and no-one even knows I’m an author.

Sharing my work gives me motivation to write more. It also helps me focus on what’s important in my process and in my stories. To write about what you’re doing you first have to stop and think hard about what your process, and that can help you realise that there could be a better/different way to do things.

In November, the Facebook page will be for daily updates. The blog I’ll hopefully do a couple of times a week, and the email list will be for weekly updates. In case you need more of a reason to share your work, check out the book Show Your Work by Austin Kleon.

So that’s that. If anyone were to ask my advice on getting started, I would say that those three things above have been the most helpful to me: Your rough draft is not your final draft (or, writing is re-writing), plan well and share your work and your process.

There are other little bits and pieces I’ve learned. Some of them, like learning markdown and WordPress, are handy but not important. A couple of others are things that I have learned about myself that I actively want to change; these I’ll cover in a seperate post.

If you found this post helpful, please share it to your social media platform of choice, and if you’re into that sort of thing, give me a like and a follow on Facebook and Twitter.

The idea is this: write 50,000 words in the month of November. The prize? You win 50,000 words that you would not have written if you hadn’t bothered to participate in NaNoWriMo.

Before I begin.

I think that some people spend time before November plotting out their story and planning their characters. I don’t want to do that. I want to see if I can put the whole process into the one month. There are, however, two steps that I have taken in preparation for the novel: one for the, and one for process.

Story.

When creating a setting, I don’t enjoy sitting down and figuring out things like the way that the spacecraft move through space or politics or anything like that. I like to discover that stuff while drafting, and then go back and flesh it out later.

So in preparation for November, I’ve written a short story set in the same universe that the novel will take place. I think the characters from the short might have minor roles in the novel, though I don’t know for sure yet. Anyway, I always prefer world building by actually writing stories in the world and exploring it through the characters, instead of sitting down and trying to figure out how everything works.

Process.

To prepare my process, I read Rock Your Plot and Rock Your Revisions by Cathy Yardley. Plotting and planning is an area that I need to strengthen, and these two books teach some fundamental concepts in those two areas.

To this day, I have struggled with editing. I never really had that much of a plan laid out. When it came time to edit, I would just get stuck in from page one and start editing everything. It was almost impossible for me to take a step back and look and the bigger picture to see the problems with my story. And that is where these two books come in. My NaNo novel is going to be tightly plotted, and I’m looking forward to seeing how this affects my drafting and editing.

Drafting I’m confident with. Remember, the one unbreakable rule that I have is that my first draft (or Zero draft) is never to be viewed by anyone other than me. This is what allows me to write so fast; changing that will drastically change my process and slow me down. The point is, I can’t just sit down and bust out 50,000 words then post it up and say “job’s done!” I want to be able to have at least 50,000 words I can share by the end of November.

The rough plan.

First two days: Plotting and planning. Writing out plot outline and character sheets. Checking over everything to make sure it all makes sense. Filling in scene plans and information.

Third day: Optional planning if needed. Otherwise, drafting begins!

Up to the 20th November: Drafting. By that date, I want to have drafted at least 60,000 words, assuming I’m going to lose 10% to editing. This timeframe is based on a few things. 1) I can confidently write 5000 words a day. 2) I don’t know how busy I’ll be with my day job over that period, so I may have a few days when I can’t write.

10% might not seem like much to lose to editing, but I’m assuming my drafting will be tighter due to the plot outline I will have written.

That leaves me ten days to edit. Again, I’m assuming that the editing process will be faster due to the tighter draft and tighter plot. We’ll see, I guess!!

Having deadlines makes me more motivated.

In the past, when people have asked me when I’ll have finished drafting something or editing something, or have something available for them to buy. I’ve always just shrugged and said “soon” or “when it’s ready.” Even though these numbers and dates aren’t really based on any hard experience, it feels better to actually put a deadline on things and work towards them.

I love the idea of being able to sit on the couch in my dressing gown and get a whole lot of work done. Maybe never is too strong a word. But at the moment, I can’t do it.

At home, there are too many distractions. The fridge is filled with the food I like. My favourite cafe’s are just down the road (which are also filled with the food I like). Netflix. Computer games. In-fact, let’s just say ‘unlimited internet access.’ They’re all there.

Changing the setting.

So I recently bought a laptop and moved my writing space to a public library. And it’s made a huge difference to my productivity. Getting up, getting dressed and commuting to somewhere makes me treat writing like a real job. I have to get there early to get a good seat, and once I’ve got that seat I don’t want to leave it in case I lose it.

And that, I suppose, is the trick. Getting to know yourself and being able to admit what your limitations are, and what you can do to overcome them. I would love to be able to sit around on the couch and get things done, but I’m just not there yet. Sometimes it goes against your instincts. In fact, I had to fight myself to get out the door the first few times. My mind told me that I’ll be fine writing from home! Don’t waste all that time commuting! The problem with that was every time I had listened to that voice, I would manage to find other things to do at home, to the point where I was doing very little (if any) writing at all.

Finding new ways to overcome resistance.

This, to me, is what Steven Pressfield is referring to as resistance in his book The War of Art . The concept is that there is this force that you have to overcome if you want to do anything creative. I think that as soon as you recognise it you can use it as a sort of internal compass: it shows you your true north by trying to pull you south. All you have to do is pull in the other direction, and you’ll become that thing you want to be. So when I feel the urge to stay home, I know it’s time for me to get out.

Which can be hard, but that’s the point. And besides, I prefer being around people anyway.